"Why yes I do have E1 twisted pair to E1 coax baluns, and 50 ohm BNC to 75 ohm BNC with matching stubs, and VGA to SCART cables, right here in my big box of cables!" <gestures at shed with bulging walls>
The neat thing about propane as a refrigerant is that it's a really powerful one, actually rather better than R12 in practical applications.
If you replaced an R134a fill with R290 you'd need about half as much gas and if it got out, it's got a Global Warming Potential of 3, making it three times as bad as carbon dioxide and about 475 times better than the same amount of R134a.
Even in a very large air conditioning system like in my elderly Range Rover, the 500g or so of propane it would need is about the same as the engine sucks up in about four miles.
The effect of that escaping into the atmosphere is about as bad as the amount of petrol you spilled the last time you refilled your lawnmower.
If you're worried about the ZOMG IT IS GAS IT WILL MAKE A GINORMOUS EXPLODISHION aspect like a lot of people are, ask yourself this - how many aerosol cans are in your car right now? Tin of deicer, tin of magic tyre inflater, maybe a tin of air freshener or WD40 or something? You're already carrying more propane around with you, rattling around loose at your feet.
Mostly yes, you need to vacuum it down well and make sure you have compatible oil in the compressor. Some types of plastic tubing aren't particularly compatible but for cars it's okay.
Maybe but at this point I no longer think it's fair to be quite this dry on something that quite so many people would be legitimately sincere about anyway so I wouldn't exactly apologize for being the victim.
I take your point, but what you’re describing would have to cost thousands just in putting in underfloor pipes. It will never make financial sense to do it? Or am I misinterpreting your suggestion?
> I look at my cohort who I schooled with, and they are all so terrifyingly sober and adult, and take themselves so very seriously. They toil, they spin, they die.
Ah, this is the problem, I work with people who take themselves so terribly seriously all the time.
But they do not take what they do seriously.
I don't take myself seriously at all, which really seems to irritate some people - but I take what I do very seriously indeed.
And then the people paying the wages don't seem to understand why my time is *so* *bloody* *expensive*. Yeah, it's not expensive, it's just a lot of money.
> And he talks about how you can choose to change your perspective or mindset and see work as a form of play, where you live in the moment.
I think it's hilarious that they just let me play with a £150k Nexus 9000 stack at work, like it's fucking Roblox or something.
"Here you go EB, figure that one out, all it's doing is connecting our core network with our VM servers and SAN, no pressure! Documentation? Naaah, we never had any of that..."
It was fairly early in my career in IT that I realised that very few other people at the company really understood what it was that I did, or at least that, as long as the outcome was 'good enough' then how I got there didn't matter and no company has the time to have people monitoring _how_ anyone is doing their jobs (outside of where such things are heavily regulated or prevent fatal accidents kind of things).
It's liberating. There seems to be more scope for freedom in what you do than most people think there is.
One of the first emails from the school when my small son was in Primary 1 was that they'd been making some pancakes in class and he'd picked up a Big Sharp Knife and began slicing some strawberries to put on them, and this was Very Much Not Allowed!
Children should not be touching the Big Sharp Knives!
Yeah, did he cut himself? No? Was he holding the knife and the strawberries carefully, so he didn't cut himself? Yes?
Want to take a guess as to why?
He's five. He knows how to chop vegetables. My parents taught me how to cook from a young age, I am teaching him how to cook from a young age. I'm raising a *man* here, not a perma-infant.
Although, between you and me, I think he could stand to use a bit less oregano in his pizza sauce. I'd never criticise his choices, I think he'll figure it out in time.
More people should read Oliver Sacks' book Uncle Tungsten. As a kid he was allowed to buy real chemicals for his chemistry set and was told things like "can you make slightly less hydrogen peroxide next time". Minors buying pitchblende (Uranium ore) at the local drugstore for experiments? Sure, might encourage them to be scientists.
I think the first time my son said the 'f' word, he got the tone and the body language exactly right for the context in which he used it (a frustrated/resigned "fuck's sake", with roll-eyes and throw-head-back, look up to the sky). He might have been five years old at the time. And back then, I really didn't say it around them very much (out of an attempt to be somewhat responsible).
They're absorbing everything. They're scraping the entirety of your personality to build their own.
I never quite understood the obsession with keeping some language away from children that everyone uses themselves. The words are there because they are needed. Walking the euphemism treadmill is a Sisyphus effort.
I heard of a study [1] claiming that people that swear more have a larger vocabulary in general, so your efforts might be counter-intuitive to your goal.
Don't see how deprivation of some words leads to the knowledge of other words, either. Maybe if you interject and correct swear word usage by providing other words that would be a better fit.
> Taboo word fluency is correlated with general fluency.
> Taboo words comprise pejoratives and slurs.
> Taboo fluency is correlated with neuroticism and openness.
When EBv2.0 was tiny, like could walk but not really talk tiny, and I was WFH Because Coronapocalypse, he one day did a straight deadass impersonation of me.
Picked up a cordless mouse and held it up to his little ear like a phone, "Hello? Yeah? Yeah..." and started wandering around the living room with it, occasionally scowling and holding his other hand up to his ear, "yeah... yeah... well yeah, yeah? Naja, yeah... nah, nein! <waving expansively> Nein nein nein... Yeah, 'kay, bye."
Put the mouse down on the table.
"Uuuuuurgh....."
Absolutely nailed it, Gary Oldman level precision.
Runrig's song "Fichead Bliadhna", too, but that's more kind of a protest song:
Ruith sa mhonadh, ruith nam beann
’S mar sin dhan sgoil aig deireadh samhraidh
Nar clann aig còig bliadhna dh’aois
’S gun facal Beurla nar ceann
translated:
Freedom of the moor, freedom of the hills (Ruith is literally "running" though)
And off to school at summer's end
As children of five years old
And not a word of English in our heads
Particularly resonant with me as my 6-year-old cycles off to school for the second month of Primary 2. Quite a wrench to have to deal with sitting still and listening to the teacher when it's 20° outside and sunny and there are bikes and toy cars and mud and sticks.
At least some twenty years later by the late 70s when I was that age they actually were teaching Gaelic in schools again instead of literally beating it out of people, and now my son is in a Gaelic-medium class in school making it one of the three languages he speaks.
I was talking to an American yesterday who couldn't understand the concept of the Highlands yesterday. His whole idea was of a place presented magically but with little more than funny accents in it.
I tried to get over to him all the history of suppression, eviction, lack of economic development etc... but the big one is cultural. If the Highlands lose their culture (and they already have largely) then they are indistinguishable from anywhere else.
I need to get this under control.
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